Thursday, August 16, 2012

The Poor Man's Millionaire Shortbread

Yesterday was my turn to host book club, and at first I was
really excited to be in charge of putting together a spread to honor the Scottish
setting of “The Winter Sea” by Susanna Kearsley. I had all these wonderful
delusional ideas about making sticky toffee pudding from scratch and hosting a
high tea fit for the Queen herself.

But as the date approached and I started
researching exactly what goes into making sticky toffee pudding, I decided it
was a bit ambitious for my meager cooking skills. And plus, discovering the
ingredients of my favorite Scottish dessert might ruin some of the mystery for
me, and actually measuring out the required butter, syrup, and sugar might make
me abandon my new soul mate altogether.

Back to the drawing board, I settled
on the seemingly much less complicated Millionaire Shortbread, which is like a
chocolate, caramel, and shortbread lasagna. I quickly jotted down the
ingredients and headed out to the store. Sugar, Flour, Butter, Syrup-
check, check, check, check. It wasn’t until I actually started making the
British dessert that I read the directions and ingredients more carefully. The
first step was to “whizz” the Caster Sugar
and Plain Flour together with 115 grams of
butter in a food processor. Hmmm…quick question; What is Caster Sugar?

I
decided to ask Google and it seems that Caster Sugar is widely interchangeable
with plain ole sugar in Britain, so I should be good as long as I used anything
except, heaven forbid, granulated sugar.

Oops. No big deal, right? WRONG.

Next question- What is Plain flour versus Unplain
flour? Apparently plain flour is just regular ole flour, so I should be good as
long as I used anything except for, heaven forbid, self-raising flour.

Oops. No big deal, right? WRONG.

Alright, well,
at least I got the right type of butter. Now on to converting grams into cups.
Let me just pull up my trusty iphone converter app. Oh, what’s that you say
trusty i-phone converter app…Grams measure weight and cups measure volume and therefore
you can’t convert it for me? Well shucks.

Hey Google…how many cups does 115
grams of butter make? 1 stick? Great, thanks. Not really what I asked, but it’s
something I can work with. Except that I don’t have sticks of butter, I have
one huge brick of butter. So I did some fancy algebra equations and figured
that 115 grams was a little bit less than half a block of butter. It only took me
the better part of 15 minutes to figure out.

So on to the whizzing together…in
a food processor…which I don’t own. A blender works the same, right? WRONG. And
my American blender promptly started smoking as soon as I turned it on with the
adaptor. Oops.

So I used my mixer instead, which is not even close to mimicking
a food processor. I was supposed to ‘whizz’ until the mixture looked like
breadcrumbs, which after 30 minutes of mixing I finally realized was never going to happen. It was right
about this point when I started getting the sinking feeling that store-bought
Millionaire’s short bread was in my near future.
Not one to quit, I decided to go through the motions anyway and hope for the
best.

Once the ‘shortbread’ had been baked until golden, it was time to move on
to the caramel layer. This turned out a bit more promising, and I thoroughly
enjoyed licking the bowl clean. I may or may not have burned my tongue out of
sheer impatience to give the sugary sauce a sample. Oops.

I’m not gonna lie,
I’m pretty proud of myself for making caramel from scratch yesterday. It’s
almost as if I’m a real live housewife or something.

The shortbread and caramel layers were done,
all that was left was the easiest part, melting chocolate. I mean, certainly,
no one with a pulse could possibly mess up melting chocolate, right? WRONG.
Apparently, you can burn white chocolate if you don’t stir it often enough. Oops.

But I didn’t come this far just to fail at this point, and I may or may not
have bought an extra white chocolate bar for my own personal enjoyment. (Being a
real live house wife is hard, y'all. Sometimes it requires copious amounts of chocolate.)
So during my second try, I heated the chocolate up over the stove instead of
in the microwave and I watched that bar of candy melt like my house wife reputation depended on it.

I poured the
milk chocolate over the shortbread and then marbled in the white chocolate over
the top. Then I licked the bowl. Don’t judge me that my lunch yesterday
consisted of caramel and chocolate. You’re just jealous.

After fumbling my
way through making all three layers of shortbread from scratch, all that was
left was to let it chill in the refrigerator for 2 hours, and pray that the
shortbread crust was strong enough to hold the squares together. And lo and
behold, it was! And it was delicious.

Now, just running to the store and buying
millionaire shortbread is exponentially easier than making it from scratch, but
in case you get the inkling to polish up your real live housewife skills, here
is the recipe that I used. Have fun converting grams into
cups/liters/tablespoons/sticks/etc. Make sure to have your google search open
and ready.

P.S. Does anyone else get offended when a recipe advertises itself
as ‘easy’. If it doesn’t involve dumping a few canned goods into a pot and
heating it until it boils, it ain’t easy. I mean , you want me to melt chocolate and you’re calling this a
simple recipe? Who are you? Julia Child? Can you imagine if I had tried Sticky
Toffee Pudding? That one even admitted to only being ‘moderately easy’. I didn’t
stand a chance.

9 comments:

It WAS delicious! And I may or may not have been a math teacher and I may or may not have able to help you if you called me ;-) Your housewife status stands strong - don't let anyone tell you different!

This page has a butter converter which has been a lifesaver for me when going back and forth between US and European recipes and measuring methods. You can use grams, sticks, Tbsp, cups, etc. Basically every possible way to measure butter!http://www.traditionaloven.com/conversions_of_measures/butter_converter.html

Well, my choclate and caramel lunch also had peanut butter. There's nothing easier than seeking assistance from the nearest vending machine - no conversions required! Have you considered writing a Julia & Laine book?